Girl, Hero

by Carrie Jones

  Of course, at play rehearsal, every time Sasha and I sit down she wants to talk about my sister. It’s her new mission. We scrunch up in the auditorium seats. I hug my hands across my chest and we talk.

  “We have to do something,” she says. “It’s ridiculous. It’s like, oh yeah, we can do stuff about women in Sudan but not your sister?”

  I bite my lip and scrunch down lower. I stare at the ceiling. It has water stains. Someone shot a pencil up there and it hangs, waiting to fall.

  “We have to tell people,” Sasha insists. She looks at me all earnest. “We have to.”

  I nod. “But what?”

  “That,” she sighs dramatically. “I don’t know.”

  Everything is high drama with Sasha, which is good because it’s interesting. But sometimes I wish she were a little more like Nicole and we didn’t have to save the world or be amazing actresses or deep thinkers for just a minute or two.

  “I don’t know either,” I say. I imagine lassoing Brian and dumping him in a pig’s pen. I imagine branding his big beefy Budweiser butt with a WB for wife beater. “But we’ve got to do something.”

  During a break in the action Stuart Silsby yells, “It smells like feet in here.”

  Up on the stage, Paolo looks at me and I can tell he’s trying not to laugh. I look away first. He has a hula skirt on over his jeans. He looks mortified. Stuart lifts it up and looks under it.

  “Enough, Stuart.” Mrs. Gallagher stops consulting with the boys on how to dance the hula without looking girlie for a long enough time to point her long, crooked finger at Stuart. He shrugs.

  He trots over to us, and Sasha makes a big sweet look and says, “I’m sorry Stuart, we can’t talk right now. Personal stuff.”

  “Oh, the rejection,” he croons and skips away.

  I sort of wish Stuart would stay. I draw a heart on my jeans. It’s lopsided. “There’s no one to tell.”

  “How about your dad?”

  I shrug.

  “Your mom’s boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “He’s a little weird.”

  I almost tell Sasha about the empty bottles and how he stands outside my door, but she’s already worried about my sister’s cheek and I don’t want her to think we’re total trash, all talk show and stuff, because we aren’t. Not really. We just are right now. Fortunately, Mrs. Gallagher’s scream saves me.

  “Enough! Can’t you be secure enough in your masculinity to wear a goddamn hula skirt? Jesus!” she yells, then throws up her hands. “Get off my stage!”

  The boys all hoot and celebrate and yank off their hula skirts, throwing them into the air. She calls Sasha up on stage. Paolo jumps down and I gulp when he heads directly towards me.

  He plops into the seat next to me, slings one leg over the seat in front of him. “You okay? You look sad.”

  I shrug, tilt my head a little and look into his big eyes. I’d like to tell him, Mr. Wayne, I really would, but it’s like my mom said, there are no hero men. We’ve got to be hero women now.

  “I’m good,” I lie.

  He gives me the look of scrutiny, squinting a little at me, and then he decides to accept things I guess, because his shoulders relax. He has big shoulders like you. I can see him walking down those western streets. I start to blush.

  “I’ll pick you up for the game Friday, okay?” He shifts his weight so that he leans back against the chair. One hand crosses in front of his belt and the other hand kind of rests under it like he’s some sort of Latin American movie star posing for a shot. Only Paolo is not posing.

  And me? I want to touch him, sneak my hand under his, grab the belt loop of his jeans and pull him closer. It’s all warm and gooey inside me like I’m just one big want. My face must be bright red. “You can drive?”

  He blushes now. “Not officially.”

  Imagine with me, Mr. Wayne. There he is, Paolo Mattias, with a black baseball cap, yee-hawing down the streets of Merrimack. He’s got one hand on the wheel, the other around my shoulders and he’s driving free with fourteen lawmen behind him, all ready to take him to the brig because he doesn’t have a license. The car leaps over the top of a hill, careens down a dirt road kicking up dust behind us, but the way ahead is clear.

  “My brother’s going to drive us,” he says, chasing my thoughts away.

  He has little dimples in his cheeks when he smiles. Sometimes he looks like you, Mr. Wayne, all man-confident and able, and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he looks like a boy.

  Paolo and I both have nothing to do for the last hour of rehearsal. He’s waiting on his brother for a ride. I’m waiting on Sasha and Olivia. Sasha’s up on stage, waddling like she weighs 875 pounds or something and hamming it up. She’s so brilliant even Mrs. Gallagher cracks up. Stuart keeps forgetting his lines.

  “Stuart!” Mrs. Gallagher yells. “Have you read the script?”

  He sulks into himself and goes, “Yeah. I have.”

  She points at him. “Then prove it to me.”

  Sasha jumps out of character. “They’re difficult lines. I’ll practice with him. Lily will too. Right Lily? Maybe this weekend?”

  “Yep!” I yell from where I’m sitting in the bleachers cranking out the geometry homework. I alpha-dog stare at Mrs. Gallagher. She surrenders.

  “Fine, try it again. Stuart, go get your g-d script.”

  Stuart hustles off stage right to get his g-d script. Paolo leans over my shoulder. “You want to leave?”

  I’m slamming my math book and notebook into my bag before I can even answer. “You bet.”

  As soon as we mosey through the big green auditorium doors and hit the hallways, it’s like being released from prison. The air loses its gross damp theater smell. We stop in the center of the hallway.

  “Want to go outside?”

  I nod.

  Outside it’s even better—fresh air, blue skies. We head down towards the back of the building and we aren’t really saying anything, which makes me feel kind of awkward once I realize it, so I say, “Tell me more about this parkour stuff.”

  “How about I show you?” He sets his pack on the ground. The straps flap and still. I put my bag next to it and it kind of leans in, like they are meant to be there resting together.

  I flop on the grass with the bags. My hands brush against the soft blades of it.

  “Grass in New England is different from grass in Florida,” Paolo says.

  “When did you live in Florida?”

  “Till I was eight. I moved here. Remember?”

  I nod. I lie. I don’t remember.

  Wind brushes a dark wave of hair across his forehead. “You ready?”

  “Show me what you got,” I say and then realize I sound too John Wayney, too much like you and not enough like Lily, so I say in a more normal, too soft voice, “Don’t get hurt.”

  Paolo laughs. “Trust me.”

  And then he moves. He runs, springs, dashes right at the brick wall so fast I know he’s going to smash into it. I jump up ready to scream “stop” but I don’t get to, because he’s already conquered the wall, not by crashing into it, but by kicking off of it. It’s like all the push of him going forward has pushed him up instead, and with two steps he’s standing on the roof.

  “Oh my God.”

  He turns around and smiles.

  “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “Breathe, Lily.”

  “Oh my God.”

  He keeps smiling, soul-splitting heart-shattering smiles. I breathe. And then he jumps off the roof with a front tuck somersault thing and lands on his feet.

  I walk over to him, right next to him, and bash him in the arm. “You could have killed yourself.”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve practiced this a lot. I�
�ve practiced it forever.”

  “You scared me.” My hands cross in front of my chest. He takes a step closer.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “You weren’t scared. You’re jealous.”

  My eyes meet his eyes. His eyes intensify. I swallow. “Can you teach me?”

  “You can’t do that kind of thing right away.”

  “I know.”

  He bumps me with his shoulder. “Of course, I’ll teach you. Let’s go.”

  We spend the next forty-five minutes walking on the bleachers. Then I walk on one of the old railroad rails behind the school. Then I do it with my eyes closed. Then I graduate to walking on the bike rack outside of school.

  “I can so not do this,” I say, eyeing the thin metal that’s rounded and so slippery.

  “Jump up and I’ll hold your hands.”

  “What if I miss?”

  “I’ll catch you.”

  I jump. My body rocks and almost falls but I make it. My feet balance on the edges of it. Paolo grabs my hand. “That was actually the hard part. The jumping. Now walk.”

  My fingers hang onto his fingers. I look over at his face, dimple-less now, his lips that are open just a little bit like he’s ready to kiss someone or say something. No, kiss someone.

  “It’s fun being tall,” I say.

  His fingers tighten. “I can’t believe you got right up there. It’s amazing.”

  I walk forward and jump off. Then I do it again and again and again until his brother drives up and honks the horn.

  I smile up at Paolo again as he grabs his bag. “You have to promise me, no videos where you like fall and crack open your skull or anything.”

  “I’m not into that. I’m serious about this.”

  “I can tell.”

  “That video stuff is not what I’m about.”

  “What are you about?”

  He doesn’t answer. Not with words. Instead he just opens his arms wide. Then he winks and runs over to his brother’s car, opens the door and rides off, not into the sunset because it’s still light out, but somewhere. The good thing, Mr. Wayne? The good thing is I think he’ll be back.

  After Olivia drops me off, Mike O’Donnell and I walk side by side down the trail that cuts through the woods. We stroll ten feet into the trees, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred. Beautiful leaves crunch beneath our feet. Some leaves still hang onto the trees but you can see through those leaves, see the patches of blue. Blue, the color of my eyes, my father’s and Mike’s. The fall winds swoop across the great lakes over Canada, across the Appalachian Mountains and to us, making it cold.

  How I get myself into these situations, I do not know. I glance at him with my peripheral vision. I can’t believe this. This is the perfect place to kill me. Hide the body in the swamp. Yep, brilliant move Lily, walking out here with him. The tiny hairs on my arms bristle.

  If my life were a horror movie, people would throw popcorn at me, yelling, “You deserve to die, idiot! Walking in the woods! Remember those headlines.”

  If my life were one of your westerns, he’d make a pass at me and you’d swoop in, jump off the granite boulder over there and pull out your gun or your fist and say, “Let’s get a couple things straight, fella.”

  If my life were my life, which unfortunately it is, no one would come to help at all and I would be some stupid, numb, short girl caught without a plan.

  So, here’s my plan. If he tries anything I run. If he tries anything I trip him. He’s probably already so plastered he’ll fall. I trip him. Run. Parkour it and scramble up a tree. When it’s safe I’ll hike out to the highway, stick out my thumb and hitch a ride to my dad’s. That’s it. That’s my plan.

  Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

  Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

  My stomach hurts. I wrap my arms around it. His weight shifts closer to me. I shift away.

  Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

  He hums a little bit and then says, “There are things you need to know.”

  I keep walking, looking at the ground. The thing with Mike is that you never have to say much, he just keeps talking. It’s all very low impact. You nod or make a small “mmm” noise and he will go on. I hope he will hurry up with this, because I really want to just run into my bedroom, slam the door and hide. Or maybe go ride my bike, really hard, really far.

  “Your mother should probably be the one to tell you this. Actually, we should tell you together. That’s what we planned to do, but I think that the time to do this is now, right now. I think you’re ready to know.”

  Know? Know what? There’s something like a fur ball stuck in my throat; my stomach knots up. Please, do not let him tell me he killed that guy. Do not let him tell me he’s proposed to my mother. Do not let him tell me anything.

  “Well, maybe Mom should tell me then,” I say, but my voice comes out like a whisper. I hate my voice. I make it bigger. “Okay? Why don’t we let Mom tell me?”

  He stops walking. I stop walking and ready myself.

  Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

  Above me the pine needles and limbs block most of the sky. His eyes and the sky really are the same color, and both of them look a little cold. I know that he’s trying to tell me something he thinks is important, trying to muster up some pseudo male-role-model affection or something, some seriousness that he feels is required because I cried like an idiot the other day, cried like an idiot and he saw. Lord. That’s what happened with my mother and Uncle Mark. She cried. He took advantage. Why do I not learn? Aren’t you supposed to learn from your mother’s mistakes?

  Just thinking about Uncle Mark makes me woozy. I sway. I sway and Mike O’Donnell reaches out and grabs my arm. His hand. It is right there. On. My. Arm.

  He smells like booze. He’s got that swagger too, that insecurity behind his eyes.

  “We can wait for Mom.” I start forward again. His hand topples off my arm. I head towards the swamp. Decaying leaves make it smell of muck. I caught a turtle once there and kept it in a box for two days before I realized how cruel that was, tethering the turtle to me just because I thought it was neat, instead of letting it go free.

  “No, I want to do this now,” he says and takes just one stride to catch up with me. He clears his throat, a rumble of phlegm. “Now, I know that you know that your mother and I were friends before. Before I moved away. Before you were born.”

  I nod. The turtle moved so slowly out of the cardboard box when I decided to let him free. Somehow, I thought he would run for freedom, for the swamp. Instead he barely moved. Like me. I know a person’s supposed to buck up and face it when they’re afraid, like what you said in that Barbara Walters interview: “When the road looks rough ahead, remember the Man Upstairs and the word Hope. Hang onto both and tough it out.”

  My stepdad’s face comes to me for a second. The smell of Old Spice cologne. He said he was proud of me when I let that turtle go. That’s the kind of thing that makes fathers proud, isn’t it, Mr. Wayne?

  I grab a branch of a tree, break it off, hold it in my hand and pretend it’s Hope. Mike doesn’t even notice.

  I am going to hold onto Hope and tough it out. So I nod at this Mike O’Donnell, this man who shares my mother’s bed, this man with a past that leaks out with his breath.

  “Now, what you don’t know is that … Well, people make mistakes in their lives. Not mistakes, but bad decisions. Sometimes they’re just carried away by things, like when you’re driving along, coming home from work and you see a sunset and it’s purple and all you can see is that purple, and it’s so amazing, so out-and-out beautiful, that you forget you’re driving a car and at the last minute you remember, right before you go off the embankment and hit someone’s mailbox, you remember
and then you swerve back onto the road.”

  The palms of my hand start to tingle. We are almost at the swamp.

  “Now, looking at that sunset wasn’t a mistake, really, or even a bad decision. It was just an intense moment, something so beautiful and passionate you got swept away with it. That’s what I’m talking about. Am I making sense?”

  “Yep,” I say, and I start shuffling my feet through the leaves and my sneakers become wet from the water hidden on the undersides, water caught between the leaves and the ground from when it rained on the weekend.

  “Now, these moments can be about sunsets or anger or men and women,” he says.

  I nod again and my belly is fire. My tingling palms are fire. The only thing that’s cold and calm are my wet feet, uncomfortable, yeah, but ready to run.

  “What I’m trying to say, Lily, is that when your mother was married to your father and when I was married to Jane, your mother and I had an affair.”

  He pauses. The entire world stops with him. Whoosh. The birds are gone. The trees are gone. I am gone.

  The thing is, even if you guess something deep down, even if you almost know … the saying of it, the saying of it just annihilates you, stops you and you flap off into whiteness like an old-time film that’s been spliced in two. You are nothing. Just gone.

  “Lily?”

  His voice smacks into my chest and my heart starts bumping along inside it. The world begins again. I begin again.

  I ignore him and drop a stick called Hope.

  I walk right to the edge of the swamp and grab a new stick, a long stick that’s fallen off one of the pine trees, chewed off by something, it looks like. The end is pointed and there are tiny bites on the bark. The twigs with pine needles are easy to break off, and when this is done I take the branch and poke it into the swamp, stirring up the mud, looking for turtles or even snakes, just something alive to remind me how to breathe.

  I hit at the swamp, smacking up the muck, and each time there’s a mucky splash my mind whimpers with it, with what I’ve always known, My mother is a whore.